Pence is entitled to oppose compensating victims of lawfare. What he is not entitled to do is pretend he had no role in creating them.
Former Vice President Mike Pence weighed in on the latest Cabinet pick by President Donald Trump, suggesting there will be “issues” around the Director of National Intelligence […]
President Donald Trump is making changes at the Justice Department, nominating acting attorney general Todd Blanche as its permanent director. Blanche replaced Pam Bondi after her firing and since then has notably investigated several of Trump’s perceived enemies.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) generated significant media attention with her successful MAHA-backed work to remove pro-pesticide policies from the House version of the Farm Bill. But despite attracting less attention, her rejected amendment to remove the so-called Save Our Bacon Act may prove to be even more consequential for congressional Republicans. The SOB Act […]
The Justice Department has been accused of violating grand jury secrecy rules in a scathing filing by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The longtime extremism watchdog, which is being prosecuted by the Trump administration on charges that it defrauded their donors through the use of paid informants embedded within hate groups, was hit with a superseding indictment on Tuesday.But in the filing on Wednesday evening, SPLC attorneys accused acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of blasting out a copy of the superseding indictment to the press before it was even docketed — which is not allowed under court rules."This action by Acting Attorney General Blanche’s Public Affairs Officer is all the more concerning in light of his earlier rush to begin a media campaign around the first indictment, his false statement in doing so, his need to make a correction, the motion that the SPLC filed in response, and the Court’s Order this week reminding the government of its heightened duty of candor as officers of the court," said the filing. "In light of those events, it is astounding that DOJ would not be even more vigilant in its actions directed at the media in this case. They were not."The filing asked the judge to order Blanche and his associates "to show cause to explain their conduct here, and hold a hearing to conduct targeted fact-finding to determine whether to impose appropriate sanctions against those involved."Already, the SPLC case has attracted intense controversy, as Blanche was accused of publicly lying about the case by saying on Fox News the group had not shared the information it got from informants with law enforcement — something the DOJ admitted it had done in court filings.
The Trump Justice Department issued a new superseding indictment against the extremist group watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center, trying to fix defects with their original indictment — but in doing so, not only did they violate grand jury secrecy rules, they didn't really even fix the fundamental issue, national security journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote for her EmptyWheel blog.The trouble starts with the fact that the DOJ, led by director of public affairs Emily Covington, leaked the indictment to the press before it had even been properly docketed — a clear violation of practice.But if they had been trying to project confidence that they have a rock-solid case now, Wheeler wrote, they have not done so.The original indictment accuses SPLC, which uses undercover informants in hate groups like the KKK to expose their inner workings, of lying to donors about their money being used on these informant setups. The new indictment focuses much more on their "omissions of material facts" to donors.In other words, Wheeler said, originally "DOJ presented no evidence in the original indictment (nor did it add any in the superseding) that SPLC promised donors they would not use informants," and now the indictment focuses less on that and instead "repeats over and over that SPLC raised money promising to dismantle far right extremist groups, without telling donors that it worked to dismantle hate groups, in part, by using informants to infiltrate the groups."This is a huge difference between this case, and, for example, the fraud charges against Steve Bannon for using donations to build a border wall on personal expenses, Wheeler wrote, because there, prosecutors had solid evidence Bannon promised donors they wouldn't use the money one way and did it anyway, whereas here, SPLC never made a commitment not to use informants and there's no evidence donors were misled into believing they wouldn't.The superseding charges, Wheeler wrote, try to paper over this by focusing more on "omission" than falsehood. But that's unlikely to work.Ultimately, she concluded, Covington leaking the indictment early "calls attention to the degree to which the superseding indictment she was crowing about instead is nothing more than a cosmetic fix, cosmetics that call attention to more obvious underlying problems."
The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center reimbursed Ku Klux Klan members for money spent on cross-burnings and materials used to make Klan garments, the Department of Justice […]
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) changed its website to “soften” criticism of a hate group that it wished to expand as it covertly funded racist movements, […]
On June 3, a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a second, expanded set of charges building on an original April 21 indictment, alleging that $4.1 million in tax-exempt funds paid informants inside extremist organizations who then recruited new members and purchased materials for cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods. The post New DOJ Indictment Alleges Southern Poverty Law Center Funds Went to Hoods and Cross Burnings appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.